Founding Members

Mävers Ildikó

We have lost a great psychodramatist

Ildikó Mävers, who left us 2015 November 17.

Ildikó took the bull by the horns as Europa in the Greek mythology and created an organisation for 25 years ago, Psychodrama Institute für Europa. Their training in psychodrama covered a big part of the Eastern European countries, before the iron curtain fell. Her work created the basics of sustainable psychodrama training in those countries. This fruitful work couldn’t be done without her dedication and competencies in both teaching and organising.

I met Ildikó for the first time in Hungary where we both started our first psychodrama continuous training 27 years ago. We often stayed at the same hotel, the Guest House of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, build in Social Realist style in concrete with it’s own kitchen and puritan interior design. In the evenings, when we were both in Budapest during the same week, Ildikó made a nice tea table with cookies and flowers. We were able to share our teaching experiences. We had a special relationship in our Hungarian origins and in our German / Swedish present lives. We both came back to Hungary bringing psychodrama to well educated psychologists and psychiatrists. A milieu had pervaded from the Budapest School of psychoanalysis and from a group-centred psychodrama, which was already in use by Professor Ferenc Mérei who met Moreno 1963, and his students.

My last meeting with Ildikó was in the summer when we prepared the large group warm up at the 25th anniversary of the Hungarian Psychodrama Association. Somehow the circle was closed, but not the importance of Ildikó’s eternal contributions in psychodrama’s history.

Her far too early departure is a big loss for all psychodramatists in Europe.